what drive capacity would suit you?

This is a discussion on what drive capacity would suit you? within the General Discussions forums, part of the Community Boards category; Originally Posted by Codeplug
And with a mirror, you're not only protected from a sudden single-drive failure, but you also ...

And with a mirror, you're not only protected from a sudden single-drive failure, but you also get a nice boost to disk read throughput.

You'd certainly think so (if the person that wrote the drivers made it so it could read from different locations on each drive simultaneously), but according to my tests, it actually decreases the read speed (looking at the average speed):Seagate Disk & RAID solutions - Comparison of RAID 0, 1 & 5

I currently have 500GB + 80GB + (laptop) 60GB, and they're all about 90% full. And I don't backup. Planning on doing something like this when I get around to buying some more hard drives: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

I like the idea of using an online backup service, but uploading ~600GB on a 1mb ADSL line is going to take... 2 months of nonstop uploading (Not to mention the costs associated with purchasing that kind of space online.)

I currently have 500GB + 80GB + (laptop) 60GB, and they're all about 90% full. And I don't backup. Planning on doing something like this when I get around to buying some more hard drives: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html

I like the idea of using an online backup service, but uploading ~600GB on a 1mb ADSL line is going to take... 2 months of nonstop uploading (Not to mention the costs associated with purchasing that kind of space online.)

I think it would be better to upload your important files to the online backup and use an external hard drive for backing up things like your OS & other things that can easily be replaced.

I think the scariest thing about harddrives is that, you won't necessarily know when they partially fail. If you have bad sectors on your harddrive, it will only give you I/O errors when you try to access the files stored on those sectors. Your files can be silently corrupted, and you won't know until much too late.

That's why I scan my harddrives regularly. Maybe that's why I have had "more" harddrives fail on me. Most people don't know when their harddrives go (partially) bad. I find SMART to be largely useless. SMART status was all green for all 3 drives that failed on me.

Hopefully SSDs (which will probably be the future) will fail more gracefully. They say SSDs are going to fail (once you have reached the rewrite limit) by becoming read-only. That's certainly better if it's true. Time will tell.

Probably because with an SSD, the cost of doing this will be much much less. With a normal hard drive, you would need two complete assemblies to do this, which means there is not much of a point, you literally might as well just get two hard drives, since it would cost a similar amount (much more than the cost of just doubling the capacity).

With an SSD there is no such overhead, eg, adding a second drive inside would cost about the same as just doubling the capacity, which makes the option much more realistic.

If I could have gotten 2 250bb drives in one for the same price as one 500gb, I would probably prefer the former. Traditionally, that has been impossible. It is not much of a step from there to add a switch on the unit: operate as two separate drives or one "auto-raid" backup system. For small offices which do not have a full time sys admin, or for casual users, such a system could sell well because it is so simple to use: "backing up" wouldn't require any thought, time, or additional software.

My point was, if you added a RAID inside the drive, the drive's potential capacity would drop by 50%, since the two drives has to be equal in capacity in order to mirror the data.
So instead of halving the capacity, you could instead double the capacity. Why sacrifice half the capacity?
I don't see this happening anytime soon. You can always put two drives together. How could it be simpler?

Easy. You buy one drive with two inside of it already. That's simpler, and as I said, for a lot of small businesses and casual users, that will be much easier, esp if all the back-up functionality is built into the drive, and if it costs less than two drives, which it would.

If you combine that with pluggable storage (like on a card drive), which should be simple on an SSD, you'd have a great piece of equipment since at the end of the day the backup half could be physically removed from the unit and placed in a safe place, thwarting theft, fire, etc. Yes, you can already do that with regular hard drives and raid arrays, this is just taking the concept a step further and simplifying it for the "small scale" end-user/consumer.